What Do We Do with These Severe Winter Storms?
It’s not like Western New York (WNY) hasn’t experienced rough winters, but the blizzard of 2022-23 was different.
Buffalo Survives One of Its Hardest Winters
By as late as mid-January 2023, snowstorms that had commenced in 2022 continued to pound New York, with Buffalo and WNY especially hard hit.
On December 23 alone, a record 22 inches of snow fell in the Erie County region, and winds gusted at more than 70 miles per hour. On Christmas Eve, the temperature reached only 13 degrees Fahrenheit.
Already by the end of December, more than three dozen people in the Buffalo area had lost their lives due to the freezing temperatures and high winds that cut off electricity for many. Members of the National Guard were going house to house in the region to search for anyone who might need help. The storm’s death toll in Buffalo amounted to about half of total related fatalities to date.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul with good reason called the Christmas holiday week storm the “blizzard of the century.”
The Structural Problem of Climate Change
As a headline in The New York Times put it, accelerating climate change is responsible for the “supercharge” in our winter storms today across the country. At one point in the 2022-23 storm cycle, an estimated two out of every three Americans were having to carry on under some type of weather alert.
At the National Weather Service’s Islip Station in New York, four out of the five biggest single-day snowfalls have taken place since 2010. And the fifth only took place in 2006.
It might not be obvious, but there are strong links between the increased ferocity of our high-snowfall winter storms and climate change. The basic science: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. So, when temperatures cycle down into the sub-freezing range, there’s a lot more moisture available to produce snow.
In addition, researchers are looking to see whether there’s a causal link between the increasingly warm temperatures in the Arctic region and the extreme cold experienced along the Eastern Seaboard. There’s a developing theory that holds that this Arctic warming is weakening the force of the jet stream, permitting colder air from the North Pole to move farther south than it had.
One study that supports this theory found a strong correlation between cycles of Arctic warming and our more severe Northeast winters. Warming temperatures in the Arctic can cause the polar vortex - a band of rapidly churning winds in the far north that block colder winds from moving south - to destabilize. Once that happens, colder Arctic air has a freeway to rush down our Eastern Seaboard.
As the Arctic region gets warmer, the Northeast is thus more prone to snowstorms. As Arctic temps soar higher, this becomes even more probable.
While many researchers agree that this Arctic warming is a likely factor in storm severity, more study needs to be done before we can conclusively say that it’s all due to human-induced climate change.
It’s more commonly accepted among scientists that warming ocean temperatures are involved. Year after year, our oceans across the globe have been getting increasingly warmer. The Gulf of Maine in particular is heating up at a faster rate than almost all the other ocean regions.
There’s solid data showing that today’s Northeastern blizzards are prompted by these warming waters off the Atlantic Coast and aided by overall weather conditions.
Warmer surface ocean temperatures cause the air layered above to heat up. This warmer atmosphere then enables a larger volume of water to turn into vapor, which increases the snowfall potential of winter storms.
Plan, Build, Adapt, Share
How to prepare better for the climate change that’s in our future? As Dartmouth College Professor Justin Mankin told The Washington Post in 2022, the tremendous volume of snow dumped on the Northeast in recent winters is a warning that we as a society must “do a better job of managing their risks now.”
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says, we have to “anticipate, plan, and prepare” for the potentially catastrophic conditions climate change will bring.
Obviously, we need to address existential threats like climate change better than we are at the macro level. But on the local level, we can also adapt better.
The EPA notes that communities will need to protect multiple key infrastructure points: water quality and quantity, air quality, buildings and transportation networks, and public health. All these things can be threatened by flooding and sea level rise, particularly when it releases contaminants from landfills, Superfund sites, and other hazardous locations. Toxins leaching into rivers and streams additionally threaten crucial ecosystems and fisheries.
Strengthening seawalls is another major step that some East Coast communities are already taking.
Upgrading transportation culverts - designed to divert water away from roads and highways while supporting traffic flow - is another crucial part of a resilience plan.
It will also be important to maintain community awareness of extreme heat waves and their health impacts. Accessible cooling centers are vital for people who need to take refuge. At the larger level, it’s also essential to build green infrastructure, cool roofs to deflect some of the heat, and reforestation into city and community planning efforts.
Community-building is the natural and essential complement to all of this infrastructure-building.
Training able, willing locals to help out with emergency management efforts on the ground is important, as is supplying households on an equitable basis with sufficient emergency supplies and clear communication on when and how to use them.
Mutual aid, handled through a network of organizations, religious and community groups, and neighborhood participants has been key to saving lives in numerous disaster situations in the past.
See how you can lend your expertise by contacting your city, county, or state emergency management offices. There are many key roles for trained medical personnel, lawyers, teachers, and community organizers and leaders of all types during extreme weather events.